Valve has announced a new type of cloud saves for the Steam Cloud as part of its ongoing campaign to support the Steam Deck. This new save feature will sync game progress allowing players to continue their Steam games on another platform even when their Steam Deck is put into suspend mode, and the game isn’t fully exited. 

Valve had previously hinted at the idea at the Steam Developer Summit; however, it now has a name — Dynamic Cloud Sync. The company explained its working in an update published Monday. 

The Steam Deck’s launch has been delayed for two months, with Valve now targetting February 2022 due to the global supply chain issues and the ongoing chip shortage that has plagued other giants, including Apple and Nvidia. 

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Seamless Cloud Saves

According to Valve’s update, the company anticipates that Steam Deck users will frequently suspend the device without necessarily closing the game they’re playing. As you can guess, this can cause a problem with saves should the player decide to resume playing on another platform.

To counter this, Steam will automatically upload all modified game save data to the cloud before the device enters sleep mode. The Steam Deck will also download any modified game data from the servers first thing when users get back to the device. 

The feature is free to use, but it’s not automatic, meaning developers will have to enable it in their games using new APIs manually. For games that don’t support the feature, in-game progress will still be tracked, except this time the Steam will tell players to stop the game on the Steam Deck to allow for the saves to sync. Otherwise, they have to continue ignoring the progress on their Steam Deck.

The feature certainly adds to Valve’s mobile PC gaming promise. However, it remains to be seen how many mainstream developers support it in their games. Besides, this also guarantees internet connectivity requirements when playing games on the Deck, something not always available when on the go. 

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